Pages

Friday, April 13, 2012

And what About Me? Can’t Be Real In Relationships, Can Express Emotions and Feelings

When we can’t let ourselves be real
in relationships as adults, can’t let ourselves express our emotions and
feelings, the chances are that the problem is entitlement and self-esteem, and has its roots in our childhood.A lot of people think that what happened in
childhood only matters if you were overtly and really badly abused.

But it’s not true.Everything that happened in childhood has
gone into making us who we are now.Childhood was where we learned what we were allowed to do.If our parents couldn’t handle our energy, or
our needs, they might have given us the message “don’t be who you are, be who
we want you to be.Don’t express your
emotions.Don’t even feel, because it
gets on our nerves.”

The messages can have been very
covertly conveyed – by parents withdrawing, getting silently annoyed,
withholding strokes.That has a huge
impact on children, and they carry that impact into adulthood.Suddenly one day they realize “I don’t know
how to express my emotions and feelings – I don’t even know what they are!And I don’t know how to be real.”

Judith, 28:

I was discounted all my life – which, let’s
face it, is emotional abuse – and it’s been really hard to even imagine going
on a rant or expressing my emotions at all, because I didn’t have any
entitlement to speak out.I didn’t even
have entitlement to know my feelings, so I was completely numb and I thought I
didn’t have any.How wrong can you be.

I wasn’t beaten or even shouted at.My family was very civilized on the
surface.But my parents both just
withdrew if I displeased them.Which
meant having needs and expressing them.They didn’t want to know about it.I can still remember how terrifying their disapproval was when I was
about four.Imagine what it must have
been like for me as a baby.I was never
allowed to cry.

That makes some children reactive, but I
wasn’t like that.I just adapted and
kind of disappeared within myself.I got
the message long before I learned how to speak.They boasted about what a good child I was.I wasn’t good, I was just shut down.

The punishment was severe enough for me to
have learned the lesson really young – keep your mouth shut, don’t be a
nuisance, your needs aren’t important.It can be hard to undo that and get in touch with anger as an
adult.It was for me, anyway.It had been normal for me for so long to be
insignificant, I didn’t even know there was any other way of being.Scary.

A lot of people think that you’re only
disentitled from childhood if you were violently abused, but that isn’t true
either.Sometimes it’s not even really
about abuse as we understand it, it’s just about parents not realizing what
their child needs.The child grows up thinking it doesn’t
deserve, because children never blame their parents, they blame
themselves.I did.I was severely hobbled by that.

And it isn’t just about what happened in
the family.It’s about society’s message
also.How many of us have been
conditioned to believe that women have to behave themselves?Women aren’t supposed to swear, or yell, or
say nasty things.We’re not supposed to
have tantrums.How many times has a man
said to you, “don’t be so emotional”?How many times did a parent, an older sibling, a teacher, say it to you
when you were a child?

“Don’t be so emotional.”Why not?Why shouldn’t we object when we’re discounted?Why shouldn’t we get outraged when we’re
dismissed?Why shouldn’t we feel enraged
when we’re abused?Why should we be
reasonable about that?